The Real Thing: An Essay on Authenticity

The central ideas of many conversations on Indian writing often turn on a form of authenticity that leads to failure to provide an adequate critical analysis of the dilemmas of contemporary Indian life. One such dilemma, found in many other areas of ethnic study as well as in American Indian studies, is the way, as part of their early need to respond to the demand for ethnic studies, universities often placed ethnic scholars in positions of great responsibility without adequate attention to continuing development or other institutional support.

Faced with the stress of extremely complicated situations, these scholars have often become academic transients or have resorted to combativeness to survive. In fact, virtually every American Indian academic I know has either regularly moved from job to job or has distanced him/herself from academia as soon as possible. Although clearly problematic, such behavior also exhibits a Keatsian negative capability. For example, when dealing with bureaucracy, a certain level of hysteria often must be reached before anything can be accomplished. Similarly, the clash and conversation organized around issues of authenticity almost always provides the kinds of fireworks that at the very least make it difficult to ignore those issues.

Such conflict has played a role in development of concepts of self, Indian and mainstream, that are suspicious of the limiting and coercive aspects of society, and that have in critical ways turned to authenticity as a desideratum in place of sincerity. The ground for this view is not society or tribe, but exclusively the self, which seeks to achieve freedom in alienation from society. Language, for those who prize authenticity, has lost its value as a source of ethical truth or consolation and is valued instead as an agent of spiritual self-realization necessitating abandonment of social norms.

The impulse to go beyond culture, in the sense of rejecting society in pursuit of the autonomous self, has been analyzed by Lionel Trilling, who suggested that modern literature plays an adversarial, subversive role. Trilling described a vital component of this subversion as an Angelism that insists on direct access to spirit by circumventing the conditions and circumstances of life, with the direct and certain result of devaluing man's life in society. An attendant problem is erosion of the willpower to struggle with the important grounding of societal limitations to a fantasy of unfettered will characteristic of modern culture.

Trilling, an intellectual marginalized in a way comparable to American Indian intellectuals, developed an early Arnoldian conviction that literature promoted and clarified the moral life and that it taught people to fulfill themselves within the community. Toward the end of his career, however, and particularly in the youth culture of the sixties, he constantly found evidence to the contrary. As he probed the relationship of culture and literature, he saw that the aspects of modern literature that controverted his humanistic convictions were a natural outgrowth of a shift in the values animating the moral life, a shift he delineated as a movement from sincerity to authenticity. Trilling suggested his sense of authenticity in a remark asserting that the counterculture of the sixties valued highest those things experienced without intervention of rational thought and viewed irrationalism as a hallmark of authenticity.

In order to move toward more positive and specific answers in the American Indian context, it is also necessary that existing work be completed by a larger constructive philosophical effort that does not rely on irrationality as its foundation of authenticity. A place to begin might be to work toward temporal unification of the past, present, and future by working to resolve the American intellectual middle class's dramatic contradiction of living with the greatest possibility (call it illusion) of conscious choice, believing itself the inheritor of the great humanist and rationalist tradition, and the badness and stupidity of its actions.

At the same time, tribal communities must also oppose the postmodern...